


The Guinea Pig

by aph_pasta



Series: Que Será, Será [2]
Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: F/F, Mars AU, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-08
Updated: 2019-10-08
Packaged: 2020-11-27 08:16:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,156
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20945201
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aph_pasta/pseuds/aph_pasta
Summary: Alice never thought she’d be going to Mars. Nor did she think she’d fall in love with a dreamy astronaut who is completely out of her league.





	The Guinea Pig

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this for Usukustwiceperyear's Amelia & Alice collection. I had a lot of fun writing this, and I highly recommend checking out the full collection!

“Look, there’s something I need to speak to you about.”

This was the one sentence no one ever wanted to hear from a doctor. What made it even worse that Alice couldn’t even imagine that there was anything out of the ordinary. She squinted up at her doctor and watched him work his mouth like a fish out of water for a few moments.

“I have cancer, don’t I?” she asked, trying to spare him some of the pain. As she said it, Alice felt her stomach drop. The doctor quickly started shaking his head and waving his hands in front of himself.

“No! No, no. Actually, well, it’s not at all like that. The thing is, when I did your bloodwork, I had some samples sent away to another lab for some routine testing. It involves looking for certain genetic diseases that could affect white blood cells. The person who tested your samples called me and told me he found a very unique genetic variation, and he… well, we, want your permission to collect some tissue samples and have them sent to a different lab so they can look at your genes.”

“Is there a rare disease, am I dying?” Alice had begun to feel annoyed that she wasn’t getting a straight answer. Part of her wanted to get up, grab the doctor by his shoulders, and yell at him to just get to the point.

“No, absolutely not. We’re talking about genetic abnormalities that could be beneficial. The structure of your genes, in particular, is different from anything we’ve ever seen before. The telomeres- those are caps on the ends of your chromosomes- are almost twice as long as normal ones.”

There was a sheen of sweat on the doctor’s upper lip, and it bothered Alice to see him repeatedly cycle through licking his lips and swiping the sleeve of his coat over the bottom half of his face. He was bouncing awkwardly on his feet, fidgeting with his hands. It made Alice horribly uncomfortable.

“Okay, fine, you can take samples for testing. Now, if you don’t mind, I need to get going,” she said. She decided there wouldn’t be any consequences to letting some doctors peer at her cells with a microscope. It wasn’t like it would change her life in any way.

\----

The backs of Alice’s legs were covered with goosebumps from the cold room and the hard, metal table she was seated on. She tapped her fingers on her thigh, just below the papery hospital gown, as she waited for the doctor to return.

There was a knock on the door, and she yelled out, “come in!” Her doctor walked in, a clipboard in his hand. He closed the door behind him and turned towards her, and she felt very, very small.

“Here is our offer: You will be paid two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand dollars a year, and given free lodging and amenities, if you consent to making the voyage to Mars and allowing our scientists there to conduct experiments on you and study your genes for either five years, or until you are no longer useful. Whichever comes first.”

Alice took in a breath and looked down at her lap. 

“I know this is a very hard decision to make. We’ll give you a few weeks to speak with your family and loved ones before you give your official consent.”

Alice nodded. “Can you please leave now? So I can get dressed?”

The doctor blushed and made a quick, affirmative sound, before hurrying out of the room, and leaving her alone. Alice sat for a few more moments, unable to even turn her mess of raging thoughts into something that made sense. Almost automatically, she stood up and slipped off the gown. She put her clothes back on and picked up her purse, then quietly left the office.

She walked down the street, going to stand at a bus stop, then pulled her planner out of her bag and looked at the week. She would be going into the office every day, and wouldn’t be home until after the sun had set. 

Was this really how she wanted to spend her life?

The bus pulled up to the curb and the doors opened right in Alice’s face. She stood there for a moment, looking very confused, then shook her head and told the driver, “no, I’m not getting on.” She turned around and glanced from side to side, until she found a little payphone booth off to the left of the sidewalk. She briskly walked over to it and shut herself inside, breathing through her mouth to filter some of the stench of cigarettes. There were two quarters in the side pocket of her purse and she slipped one into the phone, then dialed the number of the doctor. The phone rang once, twice, then three times before it was picked up, and she was greeted by a deep voice.

She took a deep breath, then said it. “I’ll do it.”

\----

Alice smiled through her fourth press conference of the day, hands folded in front of her, elbows off the table, like she was at tea with her Nana. She had become something of a celebrity, a childhood dream come true. Before her pre-launch quarantine period, Alice had spent afternoons sitting in the Johnson Space Center’s gift shop, autographing photos for groups of schoolchildren bouncing with excitement. Everyone wanted to just be chosen to go to Mars, no training needed. 

At first she was excited, but now she was just nervous. After the press conference she was escorted into the elevator up to the ship with the group of astronauts flying on the mission. She felt grossly inferior to them, which was made worse when one of them noticed how shaky and nauseous she looked and squeezed her hand sympathetically. 

They piled into the flight module as they had on many different practice run-throughs, but this time Alice knew it was real and she felt grossly unprepared. Everyone around her had studied and trained for over a decade, and she’d only had a few months to learn basic procedures. She stumbled into her flight seat, placed far behind everyone else. They were all essential to ensuring a smooth flight to the base on the moon, then to Mars. She was just a passenger. 

When the countdown began, Alice took one last look out the window, down at Earth, before it roared away from her in a cloud of smoke and fire.

\----

The Mars base was large, stretching over the entire bottom of a crater. From the outside, it looked like a series of beach balls linked together with party balloons. On the inside, it was cold and sterile, with thin recycled air that sometimes stank of sulfur or made Alice’s head spin and ache. She was confined inside. 

The crew worked mostly outside in the greenhouses and laboratories, and sometimes they went off in groups of two or three and travelled farther away to service landers or study specific points of interest. Alice longed to join them, but she lacked the training, and NASA would never allow her to be put in any danger. She was treated with kid gloves, mostly made to stay put and do things that could in no way cause harm to her. She prepared dinners, she washed clothes, she cleaned rooms, and of course, she sat in the medical laboratory attached to the Mars base and allowed herself to be poked and prodded.

The mission’s main doctor was Ginevra, an ex-flight surgeon. It was very obvious that she pitied Alice. Whenever she drew her blood, she winced as though needles were poking her arm, and she always looked at her sadly, as though she were a child who couldn’t speak. Alice found it depressing to be around her.

She often saw Matthieu as well. He was a biologist and though his skills were more suited to working with plants, he was able to look at data from a recent blood draw or cheek swab and quickly make conclusions and reports from it. He was kind and smart, but socially awkward, and privately, Alice thought he was a bit spineless. 

Out of the whole crew, she liked Amelia the best. They’d formally met when she’d brought a deck of cards over to Alice and asked if she wanted to play go fish.

Amelia never patronized her. In fact, she seemed to look up to her.

\----

“Do you have any tens?”

Alice made a show of looking at her one remaining card.. “No. Go fish.”

Amelia sighed and grabbed a card from the pile. She took a look at it, then made a face, and put it in her hand.

“Do you have any fives?”

This made Amelia groan. She grudgingly pulled three cards from her hand and practically threw them at Alice.

Alice set down the card in her hand and arranged a neat pile of fives. “Looks like I won,” she smirked.

Amelia rolled her eyes. “I demand a rematch.”

“Okay, how about we play gin rummy?”

“You always win at that one.”

“You just haven’t practiced enough.” Alice grinned and began to push the cards back into a pile.

\----

The Mars Launch Window was arriving, when the crew could send specimens back to Earth for study. Two rockets were prepared: one full of trash to burn up in Earth’s atmosphere, and another with rocks, plants, and other samples. These included a series of vials of Alice’s blood, petri dishes and microscope slides with pieces of her DNA, and a few vials of cerebrospinal fluid. 

Alice had easily gotten used to almost daily blood tests, but she had never had a spinal tap before. She was left feeling nauseous afterwards, with a throbbing pain in her lower back and a terrible headache that worsened whenever she sat up.

Amelia came to visit her in her room, the one closest to the medical laboratory. She sat on the edge of her bed and asked her how she was feeling, then started talking about the latest experiment she was working on.

“We have these tomatoes in greenhouse three, they’re really beautiful, I’ll bring you some of the non-specimens to eat once you’re feeling better. Matthieu’s created a system to expose some to a normal CO2 and oxygen environment, like on Earth, and the rest to an environment where we keep decreasing our air input and letting in some Mars air, until maybe they adapt. We can’t eat them, of course, but it’ll be cool to see if we can make plants grow in the Mars air, and then if we can de-toxify the soil so we can eat them safely.”

Amelia kept on talking, turning to a postcard she’d put on the return rocket for a friend of hers on Earth and how she found some boxers in her laundry with cartoon cats on them, which she was pretty sure belonged to her colleague, Ivan, who didn’t seem at all like the kind of person to have cat patterned boxers.

Alice loved hearing her talk, even if it was about science things she didn’t understand or even just gossip. She barely noticed any of her pain, she was so engrossed in Amelia’s stories and the happy lilt of her voice. Amelia stayed there and kept talking to her, even after the twin moons had risen in the sky and the hallway lights were shut off.

\----

It took plenty of begging on Ginevra’s part and an entire written experiment on Matthieu’s part, but permission was finally secured for Alice to join two other astronauts on the short-distance travel rover, nicknamed MarsCart. Matthieu planned to put her through a series of endurance tests such as running and doing jumping jacks in a spacesuit, and Amelia would be joining them to recover parts from the defunct lander they would be stopping at.

Alice was beyond ecstatic. After nearly a year on Mars, she was getting stir crazy. She missed Earth, where she could go out and take a walk to the park whenever she pleased. Here, the only green she saw was vegetables brought in from the greenhouse, and she was confined to the Mars base, which felt small when she’d walked around the whole thing hundreds of times and knew it like the back of her hand.

When she was sitting in the MarsCart, clad in a heavy rust-red spacesuit she’d borrowed half from Ginevra and half from Eduard, Alice still couldn’t believe her luck. She stared out the window like a child on their first plane ride, letting out real laughs when the rover bounced over a rock and dipped sharply down into craters.

Amelia occasionally glanced over to her, smiling proudly. She took one hand off the steering wheel to give Alice’s arm a quick squeeze, and said, “I’m so glad you get to go out. You’re gonna have so much fun, I promise.”

\----

Sometimes, Alice saw a pair of blue eyes in her dreams. Sometimes, they were accompanied by an infectious laugh, and a feeling of familiarity and warmth. Matthieu told her to write down her dreams, and she did, until she realized who those eyes and that laugh belonged to. Then, she was too embarrassed.

\----

Alice still acted the same way around Amelia, but the way she saw her changed. She lingered for too long when she looked at her. When Amelia touched her, her skin tingled and she blushed so red that she’d have to hide behind her hands. She never quite felt like she could catch her breath around her, and her heart would pound faster, to the point where Ginevra had started to notice fluctuations in her heart monitor readings.

\----

Once Ginevra had left, Amelia came into Alice’s room and sat down on the edge of her bed, then wiggled onto her back so she was laying next to her, on top of her blankets. “So how are you feeling?”

“Sore. I’m not in terrible pain anymore, at least.”

“That’s good,” Amelia furrowed her brow, still frowning a little. “Can’t they give you anything else for the pain?”

“No. There’s only a limited stock.”

“Oh.” Amelia paused and looked right into her eyes, which made Alice’s cheeks turn pink. She was glad her room was dark. “I’m sorry.”

Alice shrugged as best as she could. “I’m making a valuable contribution to science.”

“Still. It must suck to be here and always be tested on and never get to do anything interesting. Being on Mars is so cool, but you don’t even get to be part of the cool stuff.”

For a moment, Alice stayed still, not knowing how to answer, before she gave an honest nod. “It does suck… to put it your way. I-” she sucked in a breath. “Sometimes I wonder if I made the right decision.”

“We all do. I know it’s different for us, but we miss our friends and our families, and we know… well… we might not be able to go back. We might stay here forever because Mars needs us to prepare it for the next generation.”

“How do you cope?” Alice’s hand flew up to her mouth and she wondered if she’d asked something intrusive. She frowned and shook her head a little, as though to tell Amelia that she didn’t have to answer.

“I remember that I’ve always dreamed of being an astronaut, and I think of how proud little me would be if she saw me now.”

“Oh.”

“I know, that wouldn’t work for you. You didn’t think you’d end up here.”

Amelia frowned more and Alice couldn’t stop focusing on the rosebud shape of her lips, small and stained red from the little tube of lipstick she’d brought with her and wore a smudge of every day. Her mind wandered and she wondered what it would be like to touch them. What would it be like to kiss them.

“You’ll go back, though. In four years. I know Matthieu and Ginevra will take good care of you, so you don’t have to worry. You’ll be alright.”

Amelia tucked a bit of Alice’s thin hair behind her ear and smiled at her. She eased herself back up so she was sitting and stood up, still looking at her. “I’m scheduled to go out to the greenhouses soon. You should try and get some rest. And feel better, okay?” she smiled fondly at her.

Alice nodded, numb, unable to think clearly. She watched Amelia leave, and wondered what she was thinking. What was she trying to tell her when she touched her hair and spoke to her so sweetly?

\----

Amelia cut the deck and began to shuffle the cards together. She stopped midway, then put the cards down, still in two stacks, and rested her fingers on top of them.

“Alice, you know how we’re… we’re close. And I care a lot about you. You know that, right?”

Alice’s heart fluttered and she gave a quick nod.

“Well, I really trust you. That’s why, well,” she bit her lip. Alice gathered a fistfull of the fabric of the apron she was wearing and held her breath. “I want to tell you something.”

Alice nodded again.

“No one else knows this. And please don’t tell anyone, I want to wait, until it’s right. You’d understand, wouldn’t you?”

Alice’s breath was caught in her throat. She felt tingly all over, like when Amelia touched her.

“I wanted to tell you… I’m pregnant.”

Alice’s mouth opened in shock. At first, what she’d been told didn’t make any sense at all. But then it did and she felt dizzy and sick, worse even than when she’d been in the rocketship bound for Mars.

“It’s Tolys’s baby. He doesn’t even know yet. I wanted you to know first, you’re my best friend and I know I can tell you anything, and I knew you wouldn’t judge me at all or worry for me or my baby or anything.”

“Oh.” Alice forced herself to fold her hands in her lap and stop clenching her fists. She forced herself to smile, numbness spreading out from her jaw. She felt stupid. Stupid for letting herself like- letting herself think she maybe, possibly had the possibility to love Alice. Stupid for not knowing her well enough, not knowing that she was in love with Tolys. How could Amelia confide in her when she didn’t even know that she’d had any interest whatsoever in Tolys. Words dangled on the tip of her tongue. How long were you dating? When did you find out? How far along are you.

Instead, Alice kept smiling, and when she spoke, it was sickly-sweet poison, souring the only thing she’d ever liked about the Mars base, the only thing that made her miss her home less and feel like she was right to go there. “Congratulations. I’m so happy for you.”


End file.
